Australia Floats Plan To Keep Corals Cool In A Warming World

WASHINGTON — In a desperate attempt to protect Great Barrier Reef corals from bleaching, Australian researchers have come up with a plan to circulate cool ocean water onto a handful of critical reef sites.

To be clear, no one is proposing this as a solution to what’s threatening Earth’s largest living structure, which has been hammered in recent years by warmer ocean temperatures fueled by climate change and the El Niño effect. The hope, rather, is to buy time and build resilience.

Sheriden Morris, managing director of the Reef and Rainforest Research Centre, the nonprofit behind the plan, told The Huffington Post that the $9 million pilot project aims to prevent the loss of coral species by staving off bleaching in select, high-diversity areas. Pontoons, equipped with low-energy solar technology, would draw up adjacent water from depths of up to 130 feet — where water temperatures are slightly cooler — and flood it onto shallow reefs.

“It’s very localized,” Morris said. “This isn’t going to save the reef. All the efforts to improve climate change need to happen at the same time. This is just protecting some of those complex areas.”

While some critics have dismissed the plan as a “Band-Aid,” “ridiculous” and a “quick-fix gimmick,” Morris argues that the scientific community must do more than simply wring its hands.

“As pressures increase, we have to increase our protection agenda,” she told HuffPost. “We have to actually start doing applied approaches for protections. Otherwise, if we do come out the other side and we do get successful international control of climate — and the Paris Agreement does hold — we might get to the other end and have lost some of these assets already.”

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The Great Barrier Reef in north Queensland, Australia.

Morris said her organization’s proposal calls for deploying the pontoon units at ecologically and economically valuable reefs around Cairns, a tourist hotspot. She hopes to have the technology in the water before January, the start of bleaching season.

“We are looking at how you can actually sustain key, complex communities into the future with the current climate pressures that the reef faces,” she said.

A coral expert at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, Rusty Brainard, told HuffPost in an email that, given the plight of corals around the globe, he’s “inclined to think that even small efforts like this are a step in the right direction” as countries work to reverse the global CO₂ emissions trend.

“Saving some reefs in the short-term provides more opportunities for recovery and sustainability over the longer term,” said Brainard, chief of the Coral Reef Ecosystem Program at NOAA’s Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center.

Mark Eakin, coordinator of NOAA’s Coral Reef Watch, said that the idea “sounds crazy,” but Australia should give it a try. And while there could be risks, he would prefer to worry about possible harm to living corals than dead reefs.

“This sort of thing really only makes sense if it is happening in conjunction with major reductions in CO₂ emissions,” he said in an email. “Otherwise, it is indeed only a Band-Aid.”

“As an analogy, bandaging up a wounded soldier but leaving them in the line of fire is not a solution. Once you get them out of harm’s way, bandages are a very useful way to bring them back to health.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlights&nbsp;six main lines of <a href="http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/syr/SYR_AR5_LONGERREPORT.pdf">evidence for climate change</a>.<br><br>First, we have tracked (see chart) the unprecedented recent increase in the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases <a href="http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/CarbonCycle/page4.php">since the beginning of the industrial revolution.</a>&nbsp;<br><br>Without human interference, the carbon in fossil fuels would leak slowly into the atmosphere through volcanic activity over millions of years in the slow carbon cycle. By burning coal, oil, and natural gas, we accelerate the process, releasing vast amounts of carbon (carbon that took millions of years to accumulate) into the atmosphere every year.